In his early Cold War novels, John le Carré referred to something called “Moscow Rules”: the tradecraft used by spies in a hostile city when they had to be super-cautious to avoid getting caught. If you want to learn the 21st-century equivalent of those rules, The Spy’s Son is a great place to start—although in real life, they don’t always work as smoothly as in fiction.

Author Bryan Denson, an experienced journalist, leads us step by step through an extraordinary espionage case that stretched, in two phases, from the mid-1990s to 2011. In phase one, Jim Nicholson, a rising star in the CIA, sold his agency’s secrets to the Russians to get himself out of a financial jam. He was caught and sent to prison. Then, in a remarkable twist in 2006, Jim, still imprisoned, recruited his son Nathan to sell more secrets to the Russians.

Nathan was a somewhat adrift young man in his 20s who loved his father too much to fathom how he was being manipulated into treachery. With words of paternal care and religious faith, Jim lured his son into his scheme. The Russians were happy to play along; luckily for U.S. national security, the FBI caught on to Nathan as fast as it had to his father.

The book’s strength is its wonderful detail. We follow Nathan as he meets his grizzled Russian spymaster “George” in San Francisco, Lima, Mexico City and Malta; we track the FBI agents on his trail. The feds wouldn’t let Jim talk to Denson, but we end the book with a strong sense of the two-time spy’s plans and motives. Clever and narcissistic, Jim did love his son. But he had no compunction about turning him into his “last asset.”

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What with all the CSI television dramas, books by FBI profilers and frightening news stories about serial killers, we’ve become quite familiar with the concept of the criminal psychopath, a person without remorse. But even now, most of us are shocked when a child is a murderer. In 1874, when our current ideas about mental illness were still in their infancy, 14-year-old Jesse Pomeroy seemed to many like a demon from hell.

As what we would now call a tween, Jesse kidnapped and tortured little boys not far from his home in Boston. A stint at a reform school just taught him better criminal techniques: After his release, he killed a girl and a boy in South Boston. He was quickly captured (though not quickly enough to save the second victim). The troubling question for Bostonians: What next for Jesse? Execution, imprisonment, treatment? Attitudes toward him changed as the study of mental illness evolved.

Roseanne Montillo’s absorbing The Wilderness of Ruin explores Jesse’s crimes and the decades-long debate that followed in the context of 19th-century law, medicine and literature. She particularly focuses on the life and social circle of writer Herman Melville, whose emotional troubles influenced Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, among other works. Melville’s friend Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (father of the Supreme Court justice) was among those who argued that Jesse should be studied, not hanged.

Perhaps most compelling is Montillo’s portrait of Jesse, who was intelligent and resourceful, but in modern terms clearly a dangerous psychopath. Bostonians were likely very lucky that he started his criminal career before he was sophisticated enough to cover his tracks.

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The buzzer blared from the door of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The night watchman peered into the grainy video monitor and saw two men in police uniforms. The men persuaded the watchman to open the door. Once inside, the men bound and gagged the watchman and a fellow security guard and made off with $500 million in stolen art. Among the 13 masterpieces taken in the March 18, 1990, heist were Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee and Vermeer’s The Concert.

Thus begins Stephen Kurkjian’s Master Thieves, a tale of one of the most brazen and expensive art thefts in history, still unsolved.

Kurkjian, an investigative reporter and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, pens the book like a mystery novel, examining the scenarios that the FBI has considered over the years. Was the Gardner Museum heist the work of organized crime or low-level thugs? Was it an inside job? Why was security so lax? Is the stolen art hidden in a backwater warehouse or a shed in the woods? Kurkjian explores all the possibilities and comes up with a plausible new theory of his own.

Master Thieves is a fast-paced book that will appeal to all those who enjoy art, mysteries and true crime. It’s a story that proves the adage: Truth is stranger than fiction.

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The baffling 1922 murder of director William Desmond Taylor gets true-crime treatment in Tinseltown, a compelling interweaving of star power, the machinations of power brokers and the desperation of the wannabes and the washed up. Together they provide the book’s apt subtitle: “Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood."

Celebrity biographer William J. Mann, whose subjects have included Barbra Streisand and Katharine Hepburn, delivers a stirring narrative set against the Roaring ’20s. Movies may have been silent, but they loudly generated big stars and big business. Did they also undermine moral decency? Religious leaders thought so. They further frowned at headlines about stars in trouble with drink and drugs. Taylor’s murder was one more scandal.

As president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, the handsome, urbane Taylor had been a soothing industry mouthpiece. Privately, he was a man of secrets. They began unraveling with the discovery of his body.

A former disgruntled valet was among the suspects. Others included: comedienne Mabel Normand, a close friend of Taylor’s and the last person to see him alive; the delicate actress Mary Miles Minter; and Mary’s protective mother, Charlotte Shelby. For many years Shelby was considered the prime suspect. Then came a strange 1964 deathbed confession from the actress Margaret Gibson (also known as Patricia Palmer, among other names). Mann digs deep into Gibson’s ties to Taylor and her dealings with a group of Hollywood lowlifes.  

He also reveals the lengths to which industry titan Paramount founder Adolph Zukor went to calm the public—and hide the truth. This happened in tandem with the rise of movie czar Will H. Hays, who became president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, a post that found him working with community leaders and filmmakers to establish a decency code. Hays was going to clean up Hollywood.

As for that murder, Mann gives credit where credit is due—citing the work of other authors and scholars—before naming the killer. We won’t reveal the spoiler here. But, in the tradition of great mysteries, this tale is worthy of its own Hollywood movie.

In his heyday, E. Forbes Smiley III was larger than life, a man who excelled at virtually everything he set his hand to. Although his name smacked of sitcom pretentiousness, he was never the rich buffoon. Raised in a middle-class, well-educated family in New Hampshire, Smiley became a superb college student, an engaging conversationalist, a gifted woodworker and a generous and loyal friend.

After college, he turned his considerable talents to the rare maps trade, and within a few years was an expert at it. His taste for the good life, however, and zeal for creating his own idealized surroundings eventually outstripped his legitimate income. So he began stealing and selling maps from university and public libraries in an increasingly feverish effort to stay ahead of his bills. He was caught in 2005 and served three years in prison before returning to his family in Martha’s Vineyard, where he has since scratched out a living as a landscaper, laborer and web designer.

The Map Thief, Michael Blanding’s captivating account of Smiley’s career, also provides first-rate summaries of the histories of map-making and collecting, as well as vivid profiles of the principal players who aided Smiley and helped bring him down. Appropriately for such a story, the book is rich with historically important maps and maps that show the territories Smiley occupied during crucial periods of his life. One of the latter is a map of Sebec, Maine, a small town Smiley attempted to transform into his vision of an ideal New England village. This project alone is estimated to have set him back almost a million dollars.

Initially, Smiley agreed to cooperate with the author in writing this book, but after giving two interviews, he withdrew, leaving Blanding to piece together the rest of the narrative through interviews with his friends, business associates and a growing throng of adversaries.

Although this is a sad story brilliantly told, it hardly amounts to a tragedy. Though Smiley’s hubris led to his downfall, he emerges as such a versatile and resilient figure that one expects we will hear from him again.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Rais Bhuiyan immigrated to America from Bangladesh in 1999 and moved to Dallas in 2001 to earn money working in a convenience store. He had dreams of educating himself as a computer programmer and earning enough money to buy a house for his fiancée Abida, who still lived in Dhaka with her parents. All these dreams were derailed when—a week after 9/11—a so-called “American terrorist” named Mark Stroman walked into the mini-mart and shot Bhuiyan in the face. Trailing a long criminal record behind him, Stroman grievously injured Bhuiyan, while shooting and killing two other South Asian men working at convenience stores in “retaliation” for the events of 9/11. For these hate crimes, which were tried as capital murder, Stroman was sentenced to “the Death.”

The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas tells the interlocking stories of these two men whose lives collided in September 2001. Like the very best creative nonfiction, this suspenseful true crime book uses the techniques of literature to develop its characters, themes and plot. Bhuiyan is our appealing protagonist, a man who never gives up trying to better himself, and who treats all humans with respect—including the man who tried to kill him. Antagonist Stroman is downwardly mobile, a lower-middle-class kid who never caught a break, and who is filled with rage toward anyone who isn’t white (and male).

Crosscutting between these two characters, New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas creates a compelling narrative of crime, forgiveness and redemption. The first half of the book explores the pasts of Bhuiyan and Stroman and the forces that brought them so tragically together; the second half reveals the spiritual growth both men pursued in the years after 9/11. While on death row, Stroman develops a correspondence with an Israeli filmmaker and begins to re-examine his own prejudices. Meanwhile, Bhuiyan makes a pilgrimage to Mecca and realizes that he must not only forgive Stroman, but also campaign against the death penalty.

The final scenes of the book bring these two men back together as Stroman faces the consequences for his crimes and Bhuiyan discovers a vocation as a human-rights activist. The True American brilliantly pairs these two American life stories and creates a gripping portrait of our times.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, March 2014

Walter Kirn has penned a number of imaginative novels, including Up in the Air and Thumbsucker, which were both made into movies. But nothing in the pages of those books could match the bizarre, real-life experiences Kirn relates in his new memoir, Blood Will Out.

Here is the Hollywood elevator pitch: Kirn befriends a con artist who passes himself off as an aristocrat, but turns out to be a murderer. Over a 15-year friendship, Kirn discovers he has more in common with this charlatan than he cares to acknowledge. Thus, Blood Will Out is as much a psychological thriller as it is a true crime tale.

The story is full of surprises and strange twists from the beginning, where we find Kirn a promising young author living in Montana with his very young wife, Maggie. He is 34; she is 19. She also happens to be the daughter of actress Margot Kidder and novelist Thomas McGuane. Kirn is struggling as a writer, popping Ritalin to complete a project, then Ambien to induce sleep. Maggie is pregnant and working in an animal shelter. A disabled shelter dog is in need of a home, and a man identifying himself as Clark Rockefeller agrees to the adoption and will pay a generous fee to the person who delivers the crippled canine to New York City. So Kirn seizes the opportunity to drive the dog, incontinent and confined to a wheelchair, to meet this supposed scion of the wealthy East Coast family.

Charmed by this dilettante, Kirn ignores all the warning signs throughout more than a decade of correspondence, phone calls and visits with Clark Rockefeller, who turns out to be Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a German immigrant wanted in the murder of a California man and the disappearance of his wife.

On one level, Blood Will Out is a murder mystery. But Kirn drills deeper, channeling his inner Fitzgerald to probe his own psyche. Kirn likens himself to a modern-day Nick Carraway, with Clark Rockefeller a later-day Jay Gatsby, who passes himself off as wealthy and erudite. Then Kirn wonders whether he is any better. Like Fitzgerald, Kirn was a naïve boy from Minnesota who ended up at Princeton. There, he developed an edgy persona, fueled by drugs and alcohol, to gain popularity as a writer, becoming a con man in his own way.

Blood Will Out is equally dark, edgy, humorous and philosophical. Ultimately, it is a book that proves truth is stranger than fiction.

Rural Alaska seemed like the perfect place for a family of Christian homesteaders to escape the ways of the world. But when Papa Pilgrim moved his wife and 15 kids to McCarthy, they brought conflict and confrontation the likes of which the area had never seen. Initially embraced as exemplars of the libertarian ideal, the family turned out to be a dangerous sham, ruled by an evil patriarch. Pilgrim’s Wilderness unravels this drama with journalistic precision and the wallop of a true-crime potboiler.

Longtime Alaska journalist Tom Kizzia had a cabin near the first Pilgrim family settlement; when he covered their initial skirmish with the National Park Service, Papa called him “Neighbor Tom.” But Kizzia’s research into Pilgrim’s past revealed him to be a master of reinvention with much to conceal. The community split into pro-Pilgrim and anti-Pilgrim camps, with many wondering about the powerful control Pilgrim exercised over his wife and children. When the older kids made a run for safety and the truth came out, it was far worse than anyone could have imagined.

Kizzia is able to capture all this with the dispassionate voice of a reporter, which allows the chilling details to resonate powerfully. For all the horrors visited upon Pilgrim’s children, the story has a suitably twisted happy ending as the family gathers once more in a Wasilla cemetery, wishing their deceased patriarch swift passage to hell. Pilgrim’s Wilderness is fascinating and hard to put down—an excellent choice for those who like their beach reading on the darker side.

If you went near a British tabloid in the fall of 2000, chances are you followed the disappearance of Lucie Blackman with curiosity. Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for The Times (London), covered the mystery as it unfolded, following each scrap of hope, disappointment and depravity with bated breath. His new book, People Who Eat Darkness, is the fascinating culmination of a decade of research, as well as a probing look into the depths of evil.

Parry begins with a cursory explanation of the case: Insecure, blonde 21-year-old Lucie Blackman disappears from the streets of Tokyo in the summer of 2000. Her dismembered remains are found buried in a seaside cave the following winter. Other writers might have opted to leave her survival a mystery, and in refusing to do so, Parry makes it clear that his book is not your typical true-crime thriller.

It’s immediately clear that Lucie’s fate was in some way tied to her job as a Roppongi district “hostess,” chatting up lonely businessmen in dark bars. Lucie’s father and sister arrive on the scene, organizing news conferences and soliciting support from Tony Blair. But the Japanese investigation is frustratingly inept.

Parry masterfully guides readers through a maze of red herrings and sinister subplots (think charlatan PIs and hidden sex dungeons). Eventually, the police find the probable killer—a man with a history of abducting and raping hostesses. But even this revelation yields little resolution, as the killer staunchly refuses to confess his crime.

It would be wrong to call this book “enjoyable.” But it is both utterly engrossing and brilliantly crafted—a glimpse into the heart of darkness we hope never to know first-hand.

Hollywood surely will be calling for the movie rights: The Mark Inside is a natural for an adaptation to the big screen. Author Amy Reading has written a page-turner about the true story of a Texas rancher who loses his life savings to a group of con men, and seeks revenge by turning the con on them.

It’s the story of J. Frank Norfleet, who strolled into Dallas one day in 1919 to sell a plot of land, only to lose all his money in a stock market swindle. Five con men pick Norfleet as their mark, weaving an elaborate trap to persuade him to invest his cash in a phony stock market trade. When it’s all over, Norfleet is cheated out of close to $140,000, the equivalent of nearly $1.7 million in today’s dollars. Embarrassed, angry and depressed, Norfleet doesn’t simply return to his ranch to lick his wounds. He decides to capture the crooks using his own bit of subterfuge. He straps on a sidearm, grabs a suitcase full of disguises and spends four years crossing the country on the trail of the offenders, donning phony beards and colorful costumes as he seeks out his enemies.

Reading, who holds a Ph.D. in American Studies, is adept at tracking down original source material for this real-life story. A key source is Norfleet’s own memoir of the events, but since it seems to contain a number of unlikely happenstances and other exaggerations, Reading finds newspaper articles, police records and legal documents to either set the record straight, or at least offer a different, and more believable, perspective on aspects of the tale. Additionally, she provides readers with some historical background on con artists and fascinating details of how they run their scams.

Reading relishes Norfleet’s entertaining and colorful account of his detective work; though she adds integrity and introspection to the tale, she doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. With her wonderful writing and eye for sensational material, The Mark Inside is a nonfiction book that reads like a work of fiction. Only time will tell whether the movie version will live up to the quality of the book.